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September 17, 2004
Moral Relativism
Eugene Volokh or at the Volokh Conspiracy had an interesting post about moral relativism and wondered if liberals are truly more relativistic than conservatives. I sent him the following email:
"Defining moral relativism is tricky, but that does not mean it is not there .I think that part of the issue is judgementalism and indecisiveness. Most of the time when I encountered moral relativism in college it came in the form of 'you cant judge another person' and 'that may be true for you but it is not true for me (or them)'. This allows people to not do the hard thinking work that comes with true situational ethics. It is easier to blow the thinking part off and say that all value judgements carry no true weight
A lot of it also has to do with the denial of objective truth. For relativists it is not that it is impossible to determine objective truth, but that there is no such thing as objective truth to be determined in the first place. It is not an issue of 'is the cat is on the mat' or not and figuring out what is going on, but that there in no cat or mat except in ones opinions.
I would argue that this is different from situational ethics in that situational ethics says that there are moral (and other) truths to be determined, but it is very tricky to figure them out sometimes. A situationalist will say 'Murder is objectively wrong' for instance, but then spend hours thinking and debating about what the definition of murder is and when does it apply. A consequetionalist/situationalsist will go even further to determine that murder may be wrong, but not as wrong as not committing murder sometimes is. A true relativist will say that all that thinking is a waste of time in the first place and that what murder is always a matter of opinion and preference and that there is no objective source of truth like God or some higher moral law that has a final say that anything is true/false or good/evil. I may sound like I am exaggerating, but I had enough discussions with classmates (and have heard lectures by occasional professors) who were not willing to go as far to say that Hitler, for instance, was objectively/truly evil. They are uncomfortable with the idea that anything is truly good/evil or truly true/false. They believe that a lot of people found Hitler unpleasant and we lack that capacity for true judgment. It becomes a very self centered world view where ones own judgement is unfalsifiable and thus very easy to live without pesky things like guilt or the moral obligations that come with seeing injustice.
I would go as far to almost characterize Nietzsche as being one of the first relativists by having an uberman ideal of someone who was beyond mere notions of good and evil, but that would be unfair to Nietzsche who put a lot of work into is his thoughts to get to that conclusion and which he was not necessarily happy with.
Most of the liberals you talk about are not true relativists if they think things like discrimination are objectively evil. But there are a lot of people who rely on relativist premises a lot of the time and I suspect many of these tend to be liberals. In my experience at least they have tended to be liberals who were reluctant to condemn some activity. Usually it is a personal moral action that a conservative would have a problem with like premarital sex, i.e. it is only your opinion that premarital sex is wrong or it may be wrong for you, but not for me. Note the lack of a particular situation in those two statements, there is only opinion. There may be examples of conservatives relying on moral relativism, but I can not think of any. I also suspect that it is a generational issue with younger people being used to arguing from what they feel (not think) to be true and who have never been forced to examine thoughtfully the consequences of a truly relativistic moral or metaphysical system. You may want to talk with some undergraduate professors in philosophy and other departments to get their take on the generational issues of feelings being more important to student arguments than thoughts."
I emailed him once before (a much shorter email) and he was pretty good about responding. If he emails me back I will try to post his response.
Oh, and Dan Rather should be fired.
Posted by Pete at September 17, 2004 04:37 PM
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